In the graveyard of live service games Concord may just be the biggest headstone, and that seems to have focused some minds over at PlayStation. Previously the noises coming from Sony were all about the importance of live service games to its future strategy, and it had announced plans to launch more than 10 live service games...
So far Warframe has been the ONLY example of a good live service game. It’s the OG when it comes to the model, but it’s also the exception, and not the rule.
“Live service” is a game that has an always online requirement. Just getting updates on the regular doesn’t make it a live service if the game works just fine without an Internet connection.
Single player Ubisoft games are all “live services”, due to some of them needing a constant connection to Ubisoft’s servers, and them having in-game shops that only work while online.
They’re the same thing. “Live service” is how Activision-Blizzard rebranded games that required to be always online. They also solidified the outline of things publishers at the time were already doing with their always online games, such as endless content players will have to buy.
Those documents leaked many years ago, and soon after that the moniker was changed from “always online” to “Live Service”.
I’ll try and find them, but first I heard from it was from Jim Stirling. “The Jimquisition” on YouTube, I think. Haven’t kept up with that guy in years.
A Horizon movie could work, so long as it’s not going to adapt one of the game’s stories, and works instead as an expansion of the world rather than a retread.
Helldivers… I’m not seeing it. I’m not seeing it at all. It’ll simply be off-brand Starship Troopers. Besides, what story is there to tell? The game’s direction is partially, in some small part, driven by the way players react to alerts events. You’re not going to capture that in a movie.
Happy new year guys!😀 Just now, it hit midnight here, and it’s officially 2025. I was playing Pennon and Battle, and I realized it’s the last game I played in 2024!! That gave it a different kind of meaning. Now I’m curious, what was the last game you played in 2024?
“This mod will ONLY work on a legitimate copy!” is just a plain lie I’ve seen many times on various mods over the years. Problems and issues caused by mods have never been because of a pirated copy.
You’re robbing the right to exist as indie games from actual indie games, allow corporations to make games like Dave the Diver take the spotlight away from real independent developers, simply because corporations are becoming wise to masquerading as an indie game.
Guess I’ll have to wait till the game is a bit more cooked. Bummer. I hope they win this stupid lawsuit from Nintendo, because Palworld does have good potential.
Only started playing it fairly recently. It’s been hanging out in my Steam library for some time after I received it from Humble Monthly quite some time ago. Decided to try it on my Deck. Runs flawlessly despite being marked as “unsupported” by Steam.
English voice acting is surprisingly good. In a JRPG I’d always find someone who’s jarring to listen to, and it’s pretty terrible if that’s the main character. But so far I haven’t found any character that annoyed me, and like you said, the actress of Velvet seems to have no weakness in voice acting skill; she can sound soft and tender, moody and dark, and scream with rage. I wish anime had more English VAs like that, instead of the default 3 voices everyone seems to use.
Not sure how I feel about combat, though. I know it’s a staple of the Tales series, but I’d much rather fight enemies on the map than being sucked into an encounter like a turn based JRPG.
I’m at the part where Velvet joins with a pirate Reaper to take over a fortress to clear the way forward. I’ve cleared out the control room and soon will be capturing an enemy battleship. So far the story has been… incredibly edgy. I’m not sure if it’ll change, but Velvet is basically female Sasuke from Naruto Shippuden in attitude. I really like the presentation, however. Cutscenes are animated in-engine and transition to animated anime slides. Very clever.
I think the only game you mentioned on that list which is actually open world might be Final Fantasy. None of the other games are open world.
Open world games are The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Conan Exiles, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Forza Horizon, Shadow of the Colossus, Eden Ring, Insomniac’s Spiderman.
Some of these have unique traversal mechanics, some of these use only generic kinds, such as walking.
Who the hell finds it fun to either waste time trying to lure them into a trap or chase them down? And it’s so much worse against ai because they don’t need to micro manage the way humans have to so it seems whenever I use them they get wrecked under the first half assed volly from any unit. This applies to literally any...
Pretty sure, historically, they were also pretty powerful. I remember at one point reading about several nations that had serious issues with horse archers. A ranged unit of constant mobility, of course they’d be difficult to deal with.
How effective they are does depend on what kind of game you’re playing, however.
In Age of Empires II horse archers are only really good in those civilisations that have adequate research for them. And then it requires a good deal of player skill to micro the units to make use of their enhanced mobility.
In Mount and Blade Bannerlord it all depends on terrain. Horse archers are deadly on any sort of open terrain, but introduce trees or even a mild amount of rockiness and those horse archers are in a serious disadvantage.
Yeah, in Age of Empires II they’re more expensive than Skirmishers, who are archer-countering units. They’re also more expensive than regular archers, and that’s not going into the research that a good cavalry archer needs, as they’re also subject to some of the most expensive research options.
In Bannerlord you can get good horse archers only be recruiting young nobles. Then you have to spend time on levelling them up, because at the lower tiers they’re just not that good, and you risk a number of the dying before they reach a high enough level.
So between the two games I play that prominently feature horse archers, I’d say they’re managed pretty well, with the increased costs, slower training times, player skill, or levelling requirements.
So the skirmisher is a spear-throwing foot soldier with a shield. Historically a foot soldier would have a shield, a few throwing spears, and then a melee weapon. But in Age of Empires II the spear throwing and the melee are divided into two separate units.
Age of Empires II does have a light cavelry line, though, and they’re pretty quick. But only civs historically known for their good cavelry have bonuses towards them that make the viable (i.e. There are various steppe-civs in AoEII, as well as Mongols and Huns, and I’m sure Turks and Saracens have some benefit to light cav as well).
In this regard Age of Empires IV is more historically accurate, as that game can have completely unsymmetrical civs, whereas Age of Empires II has far more symmetrical gameplay.
After being incredibly disappointed by the release of Sims 4, I was someone holding out hope for Sims 5 that they would have realized, “Hey, people really didn’t want us to do anything multiplayer in Sims 4. Maybe that means we should go back and make an actual good Sims game?” But instead, we get this awful news that Sims...
So… Um… If Nintendo patented elements of Pokemon (we don’t know what the patents are yet), then… Why is TemTem allowed to live? TemTem is literally one-to-one Pokemon, all but in name.
If, somehow, TemTem isn’t in violation of Nintendo’s patents, despite just being Pokemon made by someone else, then I’m very curious what Nintendo’s patent actually is.
Could it be the capture ball? TemTem uses cards. Palworld uses balls like Pokemon. Did Nintendo patent the idea of capturing creatures inside of balls, specifically? Is that why Nintendo never went after TemTem?
I’m not sure why. TemTem, and a number of smaller projects like it, are basically exact copies of Pokemon and have been around far longer, some with succesfull kickstarter campaigns.
I remember Nintendo being RUTHLESS when people over at GBATemp tried making a smash bros clone for the NDS… For free.
There are only two things Dragon Quest V and Pokemon have in common; monster taming through battle and they’re both turn based RPGs.
Have you played or seen TemTem? It’s literally Pokemon in every way, from mechanics, level design, to even how and what kind of moves the Tems can learn.
Nintendo goes after even the smallest infringements, so since they’ve never gone after TemTem it tells me the patent isn’t “monster catching RPG”. It’s more specific than that, and Palworld somehow infringes on it. As of yet we can only guess what the patent is.
500,000 copies sold is not insignificant. Nintendo fries even the smallest of fish. They’ll literally go out of their way to fuck up someone’s small hobby project only a niche few even care about. So if Nintendo is turning blind eye to a game that copied them in every way one could possibly copy a Pokemon game, then there’s something else going on.
Remember, this is not a copyright case, this is a patent case. Considering Palworld is the only game vaguely similar to Pokemon in some minor ways that I’ve seen use spheres as a catching tool, I’m just (blindly) guessing it MIGHT have something to do with that.
I haven’t bought Palworld yet. What is the current state of the game?
I didn’t want to buy it because I saw some friends playing it many months ago when it released and it look janky as fuck. Buggy AI pathfinding, janky enemy AI, NPCs getting stuck on terrain objects or player objects, physics bugs.
Have these things been fixed/improved since launch?
Good for you! You played a game so much you personally stopped caring. But that’s just you and you alone.
There are whole communities out there that are all about retro games. You’re throwing them all under the bus for being perfectly fine about something no longer being playable due to an arbitrary and otherwise avoidable reason.
This citizen initiative, if successful, has the power to change the way games are built from the ground up, and is the sort of “tide lifts all boats” thing that’ll only end up benefiting everyone.
I played some Humankind recently for the first time, and it made me realise that Civ 7 is stealing a lot of their homework. Districts, civilisations, even the leader interact/diplomacy screen all look incredibly similar to Humankind.
Obviously. I mean, I’ve only played Civ 6 for hundreds of hours. But they didn’t function similarly to Humankind. The districts in Civ 7 seem to work exactly like how they do in Humankind.
After the catastrophe of Concord Sony is reportedly cancelling other projects including a God of War live service game (www.pcgamer.com)
In the graveyard of live service games Concord may just be the biggest headstone, and that seems to have focused some minds over at PlayStation. Previously the noises coming from Sony were all about the importance of live service games to its future strategy, and it had announced plans to launch more than 10 live service games...
After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal (www.androidauthority.com)
Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Larian Says Its 'Full Attention' Is on Its Next Game, 'Media Blackout' for the Foreseeable (www.ign.com)
Sony is working on Horizon Zero Dawn and Helldivers 2 movies (www.theverge.com)
what was the last game you played in 2024?
Happy new year guys!😀 Just now, it hit midnight here, and it’s officially 2025. I was playing Pennon and Battle, and I realized it’s the last game I played in 2024!! That gave it a different kind of meaning. Now I’m curious, what was the last game you played in 2024?
Skyblivion - The Path to Release (Development Update) (www.youtube.com)
What games have you sunk the most time into?
I was looking at my playtime for some games and realized I have over 450 hours in PlanetSide 2....
Baldur's Gate 3 Is Being Review Bombed By Chinese Gamers After The Game Awards (www.thegamer.com)
Just funny and dumb.
Cyberpunk 2077 - Update 2.2 is live! (www.cyberpunk.net)
Name that game (lemmy.world)
Palworld announces Terraria crossover
source: x.com/Palworld_EN/status/1861560568756462079#m
What are some video game quotes that is stuck in your head?
“You Must Construct Additional Pylons”
Citron is yet one more Switch emulator appearing online (overkill.wtf)
Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release (steamdb.info)
λ ☣ ☢️ (λ)²
Shower thought, traversal in open world games have turned from game mechanics to loading screens
3 big ones recently, this year was God of War Ragnarok, FF7 Rebirth and Jedi Survivor...
After 11 years, Xbox One emulators are finally coming to PC - but they're not actually using emulation at all (www.gamesradar.com)
Starfield: Shattered Space - Official Launch Trailer (www.youtube.com)
Horse archers ruin every game they are in.
Who the hell finds it fun to either waste time trying to lure them into a trap or chase them down? And it’s so much worse against ai because they don’t need to micro manage the way humans have to so it seems whenever I use them they get wrecked under the first half assed volly from any unit. This applies to literally any...
I think Sims is a dead franchise now
After being incredibly disappointed by the release of Sims 4, I was someone holding out hope for Sims 5 that they would have realized, “Hey, people really didn’t want us to do anything multiplayer in Sims 4. Maybe that means we should go back and make an actual good Sims game?” But instead, we get this awful news that Sims...
Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair, Inc. (www.nintendo.co.jp)
Palworld faces the difficult choice of whether to become a live-service game or stay buy-to-play, PocketPair’s CEO says (automaton-media.com)
After 350,000 signatures in an EU consumer rights campaign, Ubisoft is adding offline modes to The Crew games - but not the now-dead original (www.gamesradar.com)
Denmark is the 5th country to pass the #StopKillingGames EU threshold - 340K out of 1M signatures in total!
Link to sign EU initiative: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home...
Civilization 7 dev on Ages system and series shakeup: "It's going to be the hardest thing for fans to get adjusted to" (www.ggrecon.com)